Governor Romney, You are doing the impossible. Your campaign is making my old nemesis, Ronald Reagan, look good. The old school of Republicans did not politicize tragedy like you have. They did not hold press conferences to denounce their opponents’ Administrations like you have done recently in regards to the tragedy in Libya. Ronald Reagan did not use the Iran Hostage Crisis to attack President Carter the way that you have gone after President Obama. Reagan told lies but not as shamelessly as you have. And when called upon their lies, they did not blame the imaginary “liberal media” for reporting them. What is with your complaint about Candy Crowley? She upheld President Obama’s assertion that he called the Libyan tragedy an “act of terrorism” the day after it happened. You made a specific allegation about Obama and it was wrong. Fess up and quit whining! Republicans like you do not apologize. It is not that you are without fault, but that you believe you have impunity. How does one obtain impunity? When one knows that a significant group of people has their back. Complaints about media bias would go nowhere unless someone amplified it. How does a message get amplified? Through a medium of communication. Also known collectively as the media. Turn on the talk radio stations. You will hear the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and many others who spin the conservative/New Republican line about media “bias.” Go to the Internet. There are plenty of web sites with this same take on the media. Look at the newspapers. Most editorial boards endorse the GOP candidate for president. Most people are not getting information from people like Candy Crowley. You just didn’t like getting called out in front of millions of people who watched the debate. You just don’t like it when someone disagrees with you. So take your own media, free of critical thought, and enjoy it. Let the rest of us think for ourselves.

As if I did not know why I have never voted for a Republican candidate, the Vice Presidential nomination speech of Paul Ryan last night reminded me. Instead of telling us what he and Mitt Romney would do differently than President Obama, he told a pack of lies about him. Ryan blamed Obama for promising to keep open a plant that actually closed BEFORE Obama took office! Ryan said that Obama ignored the recommendations of a special committee that Ryan actually sat on and whose recommendations RYAN voted against sending to the President! Ryan complained that the Obama Administration “began with a perfect Triple-A credit rating for the United States; it ends with a downgraded America” when in fact Standard and Poors downgraded the credit rating because Republicans like Ryan threatened not to increase the United States’ borrowing authority! There were other lies and misleading statements as well. And it isn’t the lying so much that bothers me. It’s that Republicans, who scored President Bill Clinton not long ago for lying about a consensual affair, have for the most part ignored these obvious falsehoods in Ryan’s speech. And what does Paul Ryan care about the fibs? Millions of people watched the speech but few of them bothered to read any of the fact checks available in the media. We’ll see whether this gamble pays off in November.

Throughout every recent presidential campaign, a dialogue develops in the media between the major candidates for the job. The candidate best able to position themselves before the public takes the job. The dialogue has its context. Voters have a distinct perception of the most important issue, how well or how poorly the economy is doing. And they hear reports of how wars are going. This perception is how Ronald Reagan used the phrase “Morning in America” in his re-election campaign of 1984. As the public already believed, rightly or wrongly, that the nation had peace and prosperity, Reagan’s dialogue was strengthened. As a way of telling the public not to argue with success, he said of his opponent, Walter Mondale, that he “never met a tax he didn’t hike” and that he “taxes [Reagan’s] patience.” Mondale’s response, that he was being “honest” about the need for new taxes, got lost in the dialogue. Given the choice of a candidate who promised jobs and a candidate who promised the truth, voters as a group were conditioned to optimism and believed they could have both. A dialogue over taxes took over the following election between Vice President George H. W. Bush and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Bush lacked his predecessor’s congenial manner and used issues in a more cynical way. Bush’s dialogue included phrases such as “read my lips, no new taxes” and a name for his opponent’s state, “Taxachusetts.” But on the issue of crime, he repeatedly named a man who had been released as part of the Massachusetts furlough program and who had then raped a woman. Television commercials made it clear that the prisoner, Willie Horton, was a black man. It was as if Bush was saying that the voters ought to fear a Dukakis election as crime and taxes would go up. He also threw in Dukakis’ veto of a bill that would have made a teacher’s refusal to lead the pledge of allegiance a crime. It was an assault on Dukakis for some of his ideas of public safety, taxes and patriotism. Dukakis responded by explaining that a predecessor had started the furlough program and that he (Dukakis) had ended it after the Horton incident. He attacked Bush for promising not to raise taxes (a pledge that came back to haunt Bush albeit too late to help Dukakis). And he made it clear that he had gotten an advisory opinion about the bill on the pledge of allegiance from his state’s highest court, which told him it was unconstitutional. The dialogue had Dukakis on the defensive even before he answered. Bush picked issues that evoke a visceral response but would not have gotten away with selecting these issues had the economy not be understood by the public to be satisfactory. Bush could not get re-elected because the economy had worsened over the next four years and because he had to defend his own record. So what is in store for the election of 2012? The economy has gone from bad in 2008 to…bad in 2012. President Obama will talk about his health care legislation and how the Supreme Court found it to be constitutional. Mitt Romney will have to find a new way to attack a law patterned to a good extent after a law he signed when governor of Massachusetts. He will also have to explain what he would do differently than Obama in turning around the economy. The burden is on Romney to find a chord that even some Democrats can agree with. Obama has positioned himself as a somebody. It will take a somebody to beat one.

Common complaints about those who run for office are the promises they make and do not keep, their unwillingness to stand for something and their reliance upon negative campaigning, especially through 30-second spot ads on television.

Recent political campaigns have featured promises in which the public has been told by candidates of both major parties what they want to hear.Nixon promised “peace with honor” in Viet Nam, Carter said he “would never lie” to us and George H. W. Bush told us there would be “no new taxes.”

Candidates offering the most appealing promises have tended to win and have had to focus on keeping them.Some promises have been kept and others not.But it hasn’t always been this way.

Robert Kennedy campaigned for president in 1968 by telling audiences what they did not want to hear: to a group of college students, he said he favored removing the deferment that students had from the draft.

Yet he claimed students as one of his biggest constituencies on election day.

Advisors told Robert Kennedy not to speak to a mostly black audience in Indianapolis after it was revealed that a white man was accused of murdering Martin Luther King, Jr.They told him the crowd could form into a mob and injure or even kill him and others present.

Yet he gave the speech, anyway.Not only did no one harm him, but on that fateful day, Indianapolis was the only major city in the whole United States that did not have rioting.

His opponents used what was then a relatively new forum with which to campaign, television advertising.But Robert Kennedy did not like this approach because he could not articulate the ideas that he based his campaign upon, such as ending the United States involvement in Viet Nam, reducing poverty and promoting civil rights for all.

So he frequently used 30-minute, rather than 30-second advertisements.They worked to help him to detail and clarify his positions and how he would lead the United States if elected.

Kennedy’s campaign of 1968 should inspire us because he chose to run his campaign by what he believed was right, regardless of the consequences.His willingness to do the unpopular and even the unthinkable showed a solid grasp of self-knowledge and gave the voters confidence of his integrity to principle had he avoided the assassin’s bullet and won election.